Climate Change and Food Price Inflation: Evidence from Nigeria (Published)
This paper focuses on precipitation anomaly as a proxy for climate change to investigate how climate change affects food price inflation in Nigeria. An ARDL model was employed to entangle and quantify drivers behind the relationship between precipitation anomaly and food price inflation. The result shows that a 1 per cent increase in precipitation anomaly implies an increase of 0.58 per cent in food inflation in the short run. At the same time, an increase of 1 per cent precipitation anomaly implies an increase of 0.11 per cent in food inflation in the long run. This means that precipitation anomaly pushes food prices upward, which affects inflationary trend in general and monetary policy effectiveness. To keep inflation under target, policy incentive towards adaptation and mitigation of climate change should be rolled out to tame climate-induced food price inflation in both long run and short run. Additionally, policy makers ought to gauge climate perception of economic agents in anchoring inflation expectation. This is in additional to monetary policy mechanism which ought to be sensitive to precipitation anomalies and other climate related shocks and risks as they affect the primary mandate of ensuring price stability.
Keywords: Climate Change, Food, Nigeria, price inflation
CAN MOST THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES EVER GUARANTEE THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT (Review Completed - Accepted)
Five main types of environments are recognized. These are the natural environment, the socio-economic environment, the built environment, the political/governmental environment and the spiritual environment, which is an addition by the author to the list of environments. However, since these environments are in most cases affected by certain environmental challenges that are common to all of them and these environments are inter-dependent, with the happenings in one affecting the others, an “integrated environment” approach is adopted in this paper in discussing the environments, which are simply referred to as “the environment”, in most part of this paper.
The global environmental issues that are germane to sustainability of environment in which most of the third world countries are still lagging behind, are discussed. These issues are weighed against the back drop of the diverse sociological challenges facing these third world countries, many of which are not showing any sign of abatement within a foreseeable future. All these have led the author to the conclusion that most of these countries may remain in the doldrums for long, on the all-important issue of sustainability of the environment
Keywords: Built Environment, Climate Change, Loss of Biodiversity, Natural Environment, Natural Hazards and Sustainability, Political/Governmental Environment, Pollution, Socio-Economic Environment, Spiritual Environment